EMERGING BATTLE LINES

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india today digital

May 31, 1991

ISSUE DATE: May 31, 1991

UPDATED: May 31, 1991 00:00 IST

Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is a principle that India has lived with for the past 40 years. But the issue has never ripped apart Indian society with the passion and anger that have come in the wake of the Mandal report. As part of our continuing series, India today invited Veena Das, S.S. Gill, S.K. Goyal, Chandan Mitra, Dileep Padgaonkar, S. Jaipai Reddy, D.S. Sheth, and S.K. Singh to debate the critical issue. The debate was chaired by Features Editor shekhar gupta, edited by Kajal Basu, and assisted by Anjali Abhyankar.

Caste vs ClaSS

S. Jaipal Reddy: Reservation is not peculiar to India, though caste is. In Malaysia you have reservation for the Malays, in America for the Negros. So one cannot object,to the principle of reservation. In India, caste is the most pervasive phenomenon and it is also the most perverse. Therefore, all those who have tried to understand Indian society in terms of class, I think, have been wide off the mark. In Indian society class and caste overlap. Special schemes for the lower classes have been enforced in the south for a century. Consequently caste as an institution in the south is much weaker than in the north.

The social and educational environment has as much to do with merit as that abstract entity called 10. I would like to read out from a judgement delivered by the Supreme Court in the Vasanta Kumar case. "What is merit?" asked the judge. "He has been brought up in an atmosphere of penury, illiteracy and without any culture, is looked down upon by society, has no books or magazines to read, no radio to listen to, no tv to watch, no one to help him with his homework, whose parents are illiterate, and that he cannot hope to seek their advice on any matter of importance. If he, with all his disadvantages, is able to secure the qualifying 40 per cent or 51 per cent marks at a competitive examination where the children of upper classes with all the full advantages, who go to St Paul's High School and St Stephen's College, who have perhaps been specially coached for the examination, may secure 70,80 or even 90 per cent, surely a child who has been able to jump so many hurdles may be expected to do better as he progresses in his life.'' The judge goes on to say: "A spring flower he cannot be, an autumn flower he may be." Why then should he be stopped at the threshold of an alleged meritorian principle?

Caste has a stronger hold on the Indian psyche than religion, region or land. Caste is not an institution peculiar to Hindu society alone. You have castes among Muslims. You have castes among Christians. For example, Christian Harijans are not easily admitted into a church. In the north, we all tend to forget that at least 50 per cent of Muslims belong to backward classes: Ansaris, Mansuris, Qureshis.

The profile of bureaucrats belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is much higher than the profile of bureaucrats belonging to the OBCs. What does it show? It shows that people belonging to the OBCs are also in need of the reservation scheme. People talk of an economic criterion. I must draw attention to one specific-example: in Karnataka between 1962 and 1973 when the principle of economic criterion was applied, it was found at the end of 1973 that 90 per cent of jobs had gone to Brahmins.

Take private industry. In our country, all projects are invariably so over-invoiced that even the promoter's equity is adequately taken care of. So people are starting industries without , investing any money of their own, on the strength given to them by public institutions. How many Harijans have been employed in the private sector? Now, the public sector is out of fashion in India. The private sector is going in for an expanded role. But is anyone giving a thought as to who they will employ?

D.S. Sheth: I do not see reservations as correcting the wrongs done in the past, or the Mandal Commission as some kind of collective vengeance. Reservation is a policy for the future. It is only a very crucial aspect of a larger policy, as a part of which we had the removal of untouchability, the human rights act, the civil rights acts, and a whole lot of things, all of which were conceived to be seen as enabling the population to exercise their citizenship rights and equality with the others.

Affirmative action then becomes necessary. This cannot be left to the ongoing social processes. Therefore, one has to identify and lift those sections and bring them into the mainstream. Reservation for OBCs is older than that for SCs and STs. It was for historical reasons that it started from the south of India and they got it not as a gift: they fought for it. They might have collaborated with the British and all that but it was achieved through political struggle. Besides Shudras there is still a heterogeneous group we can think of as backward who have political clout but are socially backward. What reservation does is decouple caste status from occupation line. Occupations are not meant to be bound to caste.

How do we look at the issue of merit in a modernising democratic society? Is merit a platonic virtue available to classes or is it competence which is cultivated through training, experience and exposure?

Veena Das: What I find most interesting is an entire series of master narratives which have been perfected. Part of this master narrative is the fact that you have the vision of the caste system as if you are dealing with something absolutely unchanged from the times of Manu to Mandal. For centuries, these groups have been exploited and now comes the Indian nation state which tries to restore a particular balance. Historically, this is all errant nonsense. If you look at actual historical records, you will find that you have very powerful Shudra castes, including very powerful Shudra kingdoms. With the coming of the British, there was a presumption that India had an unchanging caste system. I find it interesting that the modern nation state, at least in India, completelv-inherits those colonial concepts and mythology.

There is a historical methodology to show how these SC/ST categories were actually arrived at. I'll give you one example: the British repeatedly said that Indians were extremely unreliable, because you could send an enumerator into a region and he would come back and say there are 360 castes in that region. Another one would come back and say there are 36 castes. So it was very clear that there was a problem. Secondly, I find a fantastic slippage of terms. We talk of affirmative action and of reservations as if these were the same things. In fact, it is very well known that in the United States, quotas are against the law. Affirmative action is not. It is against the law to have quotas in proportion to population. It puzzles me very much as to how Professor Sheth can talk of affirmative action, welfare and reservation as if all of them are interchangeable terms.

Sheth: I was only referring to them as comparable.

Das: They are not comparable. What I mean by affirmative action is that the target a university will set is very different from the target the bureaucracy will set. It is a very different principle of redressal.

Sheth: But a university will set a target that we need to have so much percentage of women and so much percentage of blacks.

Das: Not in proportion to population.

Sheth: In proportion to the jobs they will have. Unfortunately for us, the Americans don't have a caste system.

Das: They don't have a caste system but they do have native Indians and Hispanics and blacks. They do not demand reservation for the vacancies and simply rely on the fair-mindedness of the institutions which should use their judgement in favour of the backward classes.

S.K. Goyal: Reservation has become so politically sensitive that we have not really discussed it in the economic framework of social transformation. There are landless labourers, there are SCs and STs. They have their lands now, but they do not bother to break the feudal system. It is because we could not implement our land reforms properly that the caste system goes on. Such a large percentage remains uneducated. We are just ignoring that aspect, the division between how much money we put in for higher education and how much for lower education. And now, instead of thinking in terms of mobilising more resources to help poorer sections we raise new superstructures. What has reservation given us? Look at the changes that have taken place when we look at the 1979-80 data on the corporate elite: the first thing that comes to mind is that when you set up an enterprise, you generally hire your family people to the top positions, and then you have people belonging to your own religion or caste-Marwaris will employ Marwaris, Reddys will employ Reddys.

Today you see change. The Birlas employ not only Marwaris but Brahmins, and Parsis at top positions. The hold of the family is weakening with modernisation. The same may happen to the hold of caste. So instead of reservation, if you had thought of reforming the education system, you would have taken care of social transformation. Reservation is not the answer for social change. You don't create any jobs but at the same time you divide society. Instead of harmony, we create dissension.

Chandan Mitra: I think the whole issue of reservation basically boils down to a question of politics, to a question of political power and it is, I think, the search of certain caste groups or certain social groups to legitimise the control they have come to exercise on some aspects of the economy which leads them to demand a share of government jobs, services and respectability. You can own 500 acres of land, you can be the most important person in the village, you can even have the Brahmins treating you as their head, but you are ultimately denied a certain respectability if, at least, your children or members of your family are not district magistrates, police officers and so on. This is part of a certain colonial bent of mind.

Reservation is basically a struggle for power by the newly-emergent dominant sections of the agricultural communities, particularly in north India. It finds the maximum reflection in the Yadav community, and in Bihar today you find a very strong Yadav non-Yadav realignment taking place in certain areas. And I expect this phenomenon to spread.

The question is whether we should extend reservations on a caste basis to certain sections which are, in fact, probably less deserving of reservations today than they were 40 years ago. Maybe there was some justification at one point of time where these things had not been done fully.

Reddy: Why was it not done then? Nehru was by no standards a reactionary. Why couldn't the Indian state do it at that time?

Mitra: Don't you think we're going back in time?

Reddy: Unless we go back in time we will never be able to understand the current problem. The point I am trying to make is that at that time the OBCs didn't have the political power to assert their rights. It is through a mature democratic process they have now acquired that.

Mitra: You have conceded my point precisely.

Reddy: No, I'm not conceding it. At that time the state was totally dominated by the upper castes. It was very easy to arrive at a very self-serving consciousness.

Mitra: Because of the manner in which the Mandal Commission report has been phrased and in which any kind of caste-based reservations are organised, the benefits do not reach those who ought to be the beneficiaries.

Dileep Padgaonkar: In the eyes of a lot of people, it is conceptually a bizarre report. I say this because Jaipalji, when he began this discussion, referred to anti-reservation intellectuals. I don't know if there are anti-reservation intellectuals but I do know a lot of people who have grave reservations about the Mandal Commission report, who are not opposed to reservation as a principle of fostering social equity. The report is, in the eyes of many, so bizarre because of a certain ahistoricity. A refusal also to take into account the fact that there has perhaps been more development in terms of consciousness over the past four decades than over the previous 400 years in our society. The whole attempt at Mandalisation was an assault on the process of the modernisation of Indian society. Secondly, it was seen as an assault on the consolidation of a national community in this country. The makers of our Constitution, and particularly Ambedkar himself, were clear from the beginning about the rights of the individual. In fact, there is a famous speech of his where he said that the revolution that has been brought about by this Constitution has, for the first time in living memory, put not a community or a village, but the individual at the centre of things. The whole Mandal debate became dangerous precisely because political oppor-tunity got mixed with the larger issue of social liberty. The fact also that many of the leaders of the social reform movements belong to the so-called upper castes is something we will have to answer for. I do hope that you will concede the point that there are de-caste intellectuals who no longer react to things around them merely in terms of caste.

Reddy: I belong to an upper caste.

Padgaonkar: Well, I am glad you are de-caste too. But if you are going to go into the question of roots, this has to be based in the extremely important debates that went on for about five days before the signing of the Poona Pact between Ambedkar and Gandhi. Now, when I see the great deification of Ambedkar at the moment, I am a little surprised because some of the most acerbic texts of Ambedkar were against Hinduism, against the caste system, against Gandhi. And now you find all political parties participating in his deification. I welcome this because of this society's extraordinary resilience in turning intp deities all those who disturbed it.

But I do not know, from my own reading, of what's happened in north India, whether those who claim now to be OBCs have undergone psychological damage as extensive as has a Mahar or a Bhangi. One is not against reservations where the overall goal is not lost sight of: modernising society, consolidating national sentiment. If you can achieve it without confrontation, you will get a much better degree of consensus even for reservations for OBCs.

Reddy: The Mandal report gathered dust for well over a decade before it was taken off the shelf and acted upon. Why didn't intellectuals who felt that reservations for OBCs were bad, try to evolve some method for helping them?

Das: You are setting the agenda by saying: why did you not have another policy for the OBCs? The issue here is that many people don't believe that caste, besides the SCs, should be the basic premise.

Reddy: I am referring to the failure of the Indian society.

Reservations for Whom?

SHETH: Is it an accident that India has performed much lower than very low developed countries on the education front, or is there some systemic maladministration here?

Padgaonkar: Yes, the failure to eradicate illiteracy is most extraordinary. The second major failure is in organising rural labour, which has led to all kinds of social tensions.

Reddy: There is a pattern in this failure. Certain vested interests have been very influential in getting our policy's priorities shaped.

Goyal: These are conspiracy theories. The problem is within the system. There have been certain limitations, and the system needs to be reformed, but not by saying that we have consciously done it harm.

Reddy: The vested interests, the long-threatened groups, are capable of tremendous self-deception.

S.K. Singh: As far as the SC/ST reservation issue is concerned, two things should be mentioned: every 10 years in Parliament, when reservations have to be renewed, I regret to say that on the floor of the House nothing is done. It's all hollow, all non-research oriented. Nothing. I don't think that a scientific analysis on how reservations have helped the SC/ST category until now has surfaced. In the SC category, I'm afraid, the same families have a very large number of people filling in the slots. Then, there will be a battle between the SCs and OBCs in north India. I think I can say about Uttar Pradesh, that caste was not a question of heartburn till about four or five years ago. But today the whole thing has created an enormous caste consciousness. Further, as far as government jobs are concerned, I really don't think that it is bringing as much joy or satisfaction into our rural system just now as much as money. And there is plenty of money, even for a number of categories which come under the OBCs-the Lodhas in Bulandshahr and Aligarh, for example, and the Kurmis,these are very rich and educated people. You and I are talking all the time of the elite. Now, elites in what? Elites only in government? In education? In money? In Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh, there is no dearth of people of this OBC category who are considered village chiefs. The enormous reality of the evolution of the Indian middle class, the urban middle class, in the last 12 years is something which will fill some of us with some pride and a great deal of anxiety because the upper middle class everywhere and in every society is an extremely selfish class. Kindly look into how much of this urban middle class and the entrepreneurs are OBCs. Finally, I don't think our political leadership has thought of how much corruption there is in the SC/ST certificate business. I don't think you have been to a naib tehsildar's office. If you pass on Rs 50 or Rs 100, it is easy to get certificates. This is an enormous problem you've created for yourselves.

We have to look at how good is the best education we can organise for our disadvantaged. We have done very little. The historical question is: how much in perpetuity should a society carry the debt which it has to repay to the so-called historically oppressed? Are you going to limit this or not?

Goyal: If, in fact, there was a case for reservations to start with, I think it should have been started in educational institutions. What you are trying to do through reservations is giving a certain economic advantage to certain sections of society. You are not changing the social structure.

I think a much better solution to this is to identify the handicaps and try to find some alternative to them, positive action. The private sector, for instance, with business priorities, will say, 'Look, we are looking for people who are useful to us, that's all.'

Sheth: But can there be something like fair private employers?

Goyal: The businessman is fair to himself first. He's not going to follow your policies just because you want him to. It seems funny to me that if you're against reservation, then you're against the lower caste. If you're for reservation, then somehow or the other you have appropriated the right to speak on behalf of all progressive forces.

S.S. Gill: You persistently say that the report is bizarre and all that. That we Mandalites are doing the whole thing in a static historic context, and thereby petrifying society into a caste mold. If we are doing that, it's a grievous fault. There is a whole chapter, Chapter 5, in the report on the social dynamics of caste: what caste has lost on the ritual front, it has more than gained on the political front. Those restrictions have loosened much more in the cities than in the rural areas, for very obvious reasons. Another very strong criticism made was that Mandal divides society on caste lines. It's a very naive assumption to say the caste divide was disappearing. All this is stated by people whom caste benefited. Actually, the whole thrust of Mandal is anti-caste, because the lower castes are the worst victims of the caste system.

When we went out to identify socially and educationally backward classes, we evolved 11 criteria. Only the first one has the castes or classes which are considered socially backward by others. We didn't seek caste, caste pursued us. It is quite amazing that now people who were earlier so allergic to the mention of class, because class smacked of Marxism and all that, have of late become the greatest champions of class.

A very venerable colleague of mine said: "You are not aware even though you're writing so much about Mandal, that in my house, in my mother's house, earlier a Scheduled Caste chap just couldn't enter. Now he can enter the kitchen." And I said: "After 200 years he'll be able to cook your food also. What a great concession you are making to society and you think that this can liberate society. You are allowing him to enter your kitchen because you are still exploiting his cheap wages, your wife is not prepared to do that job, and other servants, better class servants, are not prepared to work on those wages."

If caste is not a dividing factor in India, then can you today-I'm talking of May 2, 1991-name to me the top executives in any of the business houses, industrial houses, commercial firms, banking institutions, financial institutions, public sector undertakings, private sector undertakings, Government of India bureaucracy, who belong to the lower castes. Today there isn't a single secretary to the Government who belongs to the SC or ST or to the backward class.

And still if the upper castes say that there is no caste division and that Mandal is bringing about caste consciousness in society, it is the height of sophistry. Mandal is destroying caste. Give them higher education, you say, better health. Very fine. How have we gone about it? In the First Plan, we allocated 9 per cent of the resources for education. Today we are allocating 3 per cent. Why? It is not a lapse, nothing of the sort. My children went to Modern School, my grandchildren are going to Delhi Public School because it's supposed to be better. How does it hurt me if there are no school buildings in the villages, no teachers in those school buildings, no blackboards in those school buildings, not even drinking water, and if a teacher comes there at all, he works for the lumbardar of the village? Doesn't hurt me at all, so why should we allocate resources there? But look at the other side: class interest demanded that higher education be developed, there should be iims, iits, heart institutes, Escorts and Batra and other foundations so that even a lecher, a millionaire in his 70s, should be kept alive at a cost of Rs 50,000 per day. It doesn't hurt me if the infant mortality rate is very high, because only poor people's children die, their wives die in labour. It doesn't hurt me at all. Whether it is health or higher education, it's not a lapse of memory, failure of policy, it's naked class interest. You can't give me a single exception to the rule. It's the distance which divides, the disparities which divide between the rich and poor, strong and weak, lower caste and upper caste. What Mandal does is to decrease these distances. Whenever there has been social surgery, there is destabilisation. And who are the greatest destabilisers of society in history? Mahatma Buddha was one. Mahatma Gandhi was another. When Gandhiji started working for the SCs, they said this damned idiot is going to destroy society. You can go back to history and find that people who were crucified were destabilisers. Mohammed was a destabiliser. These may be very high-sounding examples. But the fact is that any act of social surgery, social engineering, which is rapid enough, is bound to have some sort of destabilising effect on the ruling classes and they will always cry wolf. Economic criterion has nothing to do with Mandal. Let's be very clear: Mandal has nothing to do with the eradication of poverty. It's not a poverty eradication programme.

Marx said that when a capitalist change comes around, they first take over power, then the means of production and then they come on top. But when a proletarian revolution comes about, the proletariat first grabs political power and then down below the economic equations change. What we're trying to do with Mandal is to change the power equation. Education is very important but education alone cannot transform society. I can give you thousands of examples: advertise the post of a clerk or a messenger and there will be a thousand applications, and you will see that out of those when we analyse whose children they are, we'll find that they are not mine or yours, they are the children of a commoner, of a porter or a landless labourer who has spent all his life's savings to educate them. And they are nowhere. What they get is the job of a postman, a clerk, on their own. Nothing else. Whereas we, I mean the upper castes, produce only geniuses. Our children-who are drug addicts, dropouts, delinquents, a shame to the family, a shame to society-own cars, bungalows, live in the greatest comfort and this is the sign of a meritocratic society. You can buy anything for your son. If nothing else, you pull strings and get him a licence, the damned fellow becomes a millionaire.

Padgaonkar: Would you give me a few minutes to recover from this sheer wealth of generalisations? I have a couple of questions. One, that there was an experts panel constituted by the Mandal Commission, and a very large number, I think perhaps all of them, after the report's partial implementation was announced, wrote of the methodological failures in that report. Second, you also had a research planning team of which you, Mr Gill, were a member and I find at least five out of those seven members have raised very serious objections about the manner in which this report was written. Basically, Mandal has narrowed the creative space between the manager and the mullah and the mahant.

I was asked the other day how many Harijans I had on my editorial team, to which the answer was: "Look, this is an open system. Let's find out how many Harijans apply for jobs in newspapers. And if they don't apply, then you go back to the institutions where journalism is taught. There you will find that not many of them are there. And if you go further down to find out why, you realise that they are not there because a completely skewed educational system does not give them the opportunities."

I dread the thought that you can hold this discourse and honestly show this extraordinary swing between Ma-hatma Buddha down to Ambedkar.

Gill: I was trying to say that whenever you perform social surgery there is always an element of destabilisation. I was not saying that Mandal is Buddha.

In fact, when Mandal gave the report, he didn't have a ghost of an idea that it would ever be accepted. Now all political parties have been Mandalised so far as the selection of candidates is concerned. This time the number of backward class candidates being fielded by all the parties is far in excess of anything we've seen before. I think it is a move in the right direction because three-fourths of the country's population should have at least half the voice in the governance of the country. As for the dissent by experts, I want to say there can be no sociological survey accurate to six points decimal. If you allow a margin of error of 5 to 10 per cent in 4,000 castes, 200 to 400 castes can possibly have been misclassified. Sheth: Wherever reservations have been honestly implemented, they have been effective and they have served their purpose. It helped people of those classes for whom entry into the middle class was systematically denied all these years.

Mitra: Professor Sheth, you made a very distinct statement that the middle class cannot be an issue in any modernisation because it is dominated by the upper castes. As far as my knowledge of history goes, from Ram Mohun Roy to Ram Manohar Lohia, all kinds of modernising processes have originated from the middle class. What prompts you today to disregard the middle class as an agency of change and what class you think should be the agency of change?

Sheth: I think the middle class will be the agency of change. But then the character of the middle class and its culture is restricted and confined to only the upper castes. At one level, I would say, the kind of system which we have run so far is, at the macro level, capitalism by default and socialism by fraud. And that has largely to do with an upper caste culture of bureaucracy which held businessmen in contempt.

Goyal: What is middle class and what is elite?

Sheth: That's why I have purposely not used the word 'elite'. I used the word 'middle class' as a class which dissolves other identities.

Goyal: First, what is the total number of jobs the Government has to offer and to whom? You are essentially reserving jobs for 1 per cent of those looking for jobs.

Now, on modernisation. I think modernisation means a little more movement of the organised sector. All old values start breaking down with modernisation. For a long time the Birlas resisted getting into shoes and leather garments, businesses seen as that of Chamars. But look at the figures now. The Brahmin community, especially in the south, has gone for leather exports. There is no taboo. Logic says that when modernisation takes place even caste barriers start disintegrating.

Because of an excessive concern about the Mandal Commission debate, all major issues of policy at this general election have been bid goodbye. You are not discussing the issues of health, employment, agricultural labour, issues related to your indebtedness, both foreign and within India. We have distorted our priorities.

Resolving the Crisis

PADGAONKAR: The fulcrum of power is shifting swiftly from the bureaucracy to entrepreneurship. From a kind of command administrative control, we are moving swiftly towards mechanisms dictated by the exigencies of the market.

The question of reservations will by and by become redundant because it will have been overtaken by several new forces being generated in our society. Once the Government no longer is the centre of the distribution of largesse, as it is today, the attraction of wanting to become a secretary to the Government or a deputy secretary or whatever, is bound to cease.

Now, I think that there are just three things to be done: expand your educational opportunities for all. Improve on their quality. Bring in at least the minimal public health requirements, but above all make sure that your economic growth is the one that takes care of several social tensions. The divisive nature of the Mandal Commission comes in because the overall ideological climate in the country is changing, the nature of economic competition is changing and you have all kinds of opportunities.

Das: The trouble that many of us have is that we go into reservations for SCs and STs and from there we make the sup into reservations for other backward castes, as if we are dealing with a phenomenon of the same kind. They are not. In one case, there is a clear national consensus, in another there is not. I would make a distinction between reservation for the SCs because I think 21 per cent is something which an institution can handle in terms of really serious affirmative action. Ninety per cent is something that universities cannot.

Mitra: Mandal is an AIDS-infected syringe which has been injected in the body politic and which will completely destroy some of the major progresses in social attitudes. The Mandal report as a whole is an even more pernicious document than it appears to most people. It talks of extending reservations down the line into educational institutions to the point where it even suggests that separate hostels be set up for backward class students. I suspect that there will be a move very soon to introduce reservations into the private sector as well, because once you start on this populist track, there is actually no end. Mr Gill's party will find it absolutely impossible to control the demon it has let loose. The next promise will be that we shall force the Birlas to take 60 per cent backwards. I think the first thing on the national agenda, I can't put it more strongly, is to defeat the Mandal Commission report.

Sheth: Is there agreement that there are groups outside the SCs and STs in need of preferential treatment?

Das: Yes, but which kind of preferential treatment? American universities have had very aggressive programmes for affirmative action for the past 20 years. They have found over the last two years a decline of 46 per cent in black Ph.Ds. The sections which have benefited are basically the affluent Asian-Americans and there has been some improvement on the Hispanic front. It is quite clear to me that if one is evolving the process of affirmative action, one would have to address the specifics and not a generality like that of the OBCs.

Padgaonkar: Just to this business of reservation being delegiti-mised....Yes, the danger exists but it exists primarily because once again Mandal is the culprit, partly because of the motivations that lie behind Mandal and partly also because of the obvious political opportunism that lay at the time of announcing the part implementation of Mandal. The result is that you are using the same brush to tar everybody again and again.

People who are already pretty prominent in the political arena get the cake. You see the kind of people who become MLAs, MPs and so on and the trend is growing. The very nature of electoral arithmetic suggests that you have to expand your base from where you draw your political personnel, and so it is happening on the economic front. It is true that 80 per cent of these may be poor and oppressed but the fact is you can tot up similar figures for other communities who don't fall within the ambit of the OBCs. I share Chandan's apprehension-that you will get this populism entering into other areas as well. For instance, the Lohia-kind of socialism; you know they nationalise land, nationalise this, nationalise that. And the other is where caste and religious fundamentalism fuse, which is again what Mandal is bringing about. People embraced Islam or Sikhism or Christianity to get out of the clutches of caste domination. I am surprised when I see Muslim leaders going along with this Mandal business. I don't know whether they realise that something will affect them very deeply.

Singh: I think the Muslims are saying, well, if Mandal happens today we can ask for our reservation tomorrow. Then we will be back to Minto-Morley and Montague-Chelmsford.

Gill: The Muslims are supporting it because they know that a lot of them will benefit from it. I gather this from hundreds of people 1 have been meeting.

Singh: It seems you and I have been talking to very different people....

Gill: Naturally. The class orientations are so different.

Sheth: Chandan, I think a lot has been said about these vote banks. As if vote banks are reserves of bonded labour in elections. Vote banks are a part of the process of garnering a mandate. If Mandal was bad, nationalisation of banks was worse.

Mitra: There is nothing wrong in the attempt to create a vote bank on the basis of reservations. But it's a question of political morality.

Sheth: Your fears are exaggerated. Democracy has its own self-correcting systems.

Mitra: I welcome your confidence in democracy. From whatever I have understood through my travels in Uttar Pradesh, Mandal is not electrifying the masses at all. It is quite possible that V.P. Singh may not succeed in Mandalising society but the seeds have been sown.

Padgaonkar: Is Mandal a symptom of the terminal illness of a society or a symptom of its rejuvenation ? There are those of us who fear that, in fact, it is a symptom of the former. I think again and again that the commitment here to reservations for the SCs/STs is pretty strong but not enough is being done in the right direction. You might have individuals or communities who deserve these reservations but you should go about it in a far more circumspect manner that has been the case so far and, to the extent possible, avoid politicising the issue because then consensus tends to become shaky and breaks down.

Singh: If the Mandal Commission report was implemented, the bureaucracy will be bullied by politicians and bought by the purchasers, because the codes of honour and conduct have broken down under pressure. And in Mandalisation of the bureaucracy, I don't think you will find bureaucrats capable of standing up to both the bully and the purchaser.

Das: I say that a democratic trust is partly broken through reservations. I will give you one example. The University Grants Commission, following parliamentary discussion some years ago, said that there is no such thing as minimal qualification of an institution. Anyone who has a prior degree has a right to admission. I have sometimes seen a student come and get zero in the admission test, and he will get the zero sometimes because of the sheer contempt that, 'I don't need to pass'. Such a student will benefit very little from his interaction with me. So I insist that the problem there is surely not that you go in for reservation but free the institutions.

You set your targets, say, in five years how many SC and ST doctorate candidates you will be able to produce. Then I think you will be able to produce them.

Gill: When you recruit people who had been deprived in every way, and expect them to perform as well as people who have all benefits, it is quite understandable if they fail. So in this process of social engineering, simply to upgrade the educational qu alifications of the dispossessed does not suffice. Bureaucracies are at the receiving end of a lot of blame, and very deserv-ingly so. But unfortunately the bureaucracy is looked upon in the villages and semi-urban areas as a very prestigious career. When you induct people into the bureaucracy they too become a part of the power structure. When we talk of politics and vote banks, I think we should be clear about one aspect of liberal democracy. You may call them lobbies, pressure groups, or vote banks or whatever you like, they are an integral part of our democratic system. In this, an element of populism comes in, whether it is Garibi Hatao or it's the hype on keeping the country together or Jai Jawan Jai Kisan or whatever. This kind of populism is a part of any democratic polity. Mandal is just a metaphor. It's not meant to be a package of solutions.

Reddy: Because of reservation, today the Harijan community is far better organised than it was, say, when Ambedkar was still alive. It would seem that Ambedkar dead is more alive and kicking than Ambedkar alive, because the SCs who avail of reservations in both education and employment have now emerged as a considerable force in the political scenario. If Kanshi Ram is being courted by many parties, it is because of the support he has been able to mobilise from the educated and the employed sections of the backward communities. They may constitute only a very minuscule section of that community. But then every community needs an elite. The Mandal approach is the best way to attack casteism. Caste is an unpleasant but universal reality and you can't wish it away by turning a Nelson's eye. You can kill this monster only by taking full notice of it.

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